Please make plans to attend a wedding in Milan, Ohio, the setting of Avery Caswell’s new mystery!
Murder in Milan is the story of Vanne Smith, a dog-over-cat, pie-over-cake, chemist on the run. During a brief stop in Milan, Ohio, she discovers that successfully disappearing requires more than changing your name and leaving behind every single thing you ever owned—or loved.
It’s August and she has traveled cross country, towing her tiny house from Oregon to Ohio, pulling into Milan just a day before the wedding of her best friend’s daughter. Her arrival coincides with that of a quintent of argumentative musicians, a couple of Las Vegas thugs, and an enigmatic private investigator from Chicago.
Milan, the birthplace of Thomas Alva Edison, is a sleepy, small town with an idyllic town square, a lively business district, and two museums. But then a would-be benefactor of one of the museums dies, and the following day, the town square is the site of a suicide.
Some townspeople suspect these deaths were actually murders, and Vanne fears she knows who may have played a hand in at least one of them.
When a third death occurs and Milan’s sheriff names her a suspect in his investigation, Vanne resists the urge to flee and sticks around to uncover the real culprit.
Murder in Milan is alive with music, seasoned with a dash of science, and filled with memorable characters, from Annaliese, the glass-half-empty owner of the Inventor Café and Inn, to Earl, the xenophobic proprietor of the Trea$ure Trove, not to mention the dueling directors of the town’s museums, Harriet Gertzner and Alicia Boatwright.
In the midst of multiple murders, Vanne comes to realize that successfully disappearing also requires trust—and that sometimes cats aren’t all bad.